I'll keep playing with all these suggestions. I've already encountered the problem of having way too many tasks downloaded from setting a 10-day buffer, but leaving the number of tasks unlimited. Now it's time to play with the limits.

I guess I don't understand how the deadline shown isn't really the deadline. After all, jobs that don't finish by this time are reported as No Reply, and risk being rejected as Too Late. I don't care when they appeared in the queue - I only care when they are due.

What has happened is that my laptop has enjoyed a number of days at home, thus seeming like it can process X amount of work, but then it travels, and when it spends time working on tasks with later deadlines instead of earlier ones, the earlier ones don't have enough time to run and finish before being marked Too Late and thus wasting the cpus spent on trying to finish.

The worst offender is the Fight Aids project, which keeps shoving new jobs at the front of the queue with barely enough time to finish even under good conditions. I finally had to exclude this project from my laptop and an old, slow machine that does little but crank cpus for WCG and be available for testing.

Thanks for the all the help.